Ebola: All eyes on borders, ports Children washing their hands in Moronvia, Liberia...recently. | credits: UNICEF Two months after the late index case, Mr. Patrick Sawyer sneaked into Nigeria, the last patient has been discharged from the Infectious Disease Hospital, Lagos, and the cameras are clicking away. Cheering news that more secondary contacts of the index case are also being discharged from surveillance has given Nigeria a little reprieve. However, stakeholders are warning that eternal vigilance is mandatory if the nightmare is not to happen again. Only last week, the World Health Organisation reported 700 new cases from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. The development has raised concerns from stakeholders who have opined that it is not time yet to shout eureka. Speaking at a recent media parley, the Minister of Health, Prof. Onyebuchi Chukwu, said the country could not afford to be complacent as long as a single case of the disease existed in any part of the world. At the last count, the WHO also reported 5,357 cases with 2,630 deaths in the West African region. Nigeria is still counting the costs with 19 confirmed cases of the Ebola Virus Disease and seven deaths. In a telephone interview with our correspondent on Sunday, the former president, Nigerian Medical Association, Dr. Osahon Enabulele, canvassed personal and institutional measures to ensure that the virus did not find its way into the country again. While urging Nigerians to sustain the culture of hand washing and general cleanliness, Enabulele advised government to fund research development and strengthen health facilities across the country. He said, “The government should not only sustain the current momentum but build on it. We should become proactive in our surveillance mechanism at points of entry into the country. I expect that a wake-up call from the Ebola crisis will not die with the virus but be a daily routine in terms of hand washing and sanitation in public places such as schools. “As much as possible, government, through its ministries, departments and agencies, especially through the National Orientation Agency, needs to step up its efforts at driving increased health awareness. We must aggressively invest more resources in research development. The near-collapse of research in the West African region is evident with this outbreak. It must be a focused research that addresses our national public health needs. ” Also, a professor of Paediatrics, Edamisan Temiye, has advised government to continue with the screening procedures already adopted at air and sea ports in the country. Temiye said, “Surveillance should continue until the epidemic ends in West Africa. We cannot let down our guard until the situation is under control. The authorities in the countries where the disease is endemic should ensure that someone who is ill is not allowed to leave the country. “Even in Nigeria, if someone is ill, let him or her go and see a doctor. Some people are in the habit of giving an ailing child paracetamol and then send the child to school. That is wrong. There are other viral haemorrhagic diseases in Nigeria apart from Ebola. There is still Lassa fever. It is our personal responsibility to make sure we don’t spread infectious diseases.’’ A senior lecturer at the Lagos Business School, Dr. Henrietta Onwuegbuzie, also called on the private sector not to relent in complementing efforts from the government. According to her, it could be disastrous to scale down interventions even as the virus rages through some towns and villages in West Africa. “We have many porous borders and cannot control the flow of people coming in and out of Nigeria. We therefore have to remain on red alert and ensure there are measures in place to prevent what could be the worst epidemic ever recorded, given our large population and the absence of amenities to prevent transmission, or treat/isolate infected patients,’’ she said. Lockdown ends in Sierra Leone Meanwhile, volunteers going from door to door during a three-day lockdown intended to combat Ebola in Sierra Leone say some residents are growing increasingly frustrated and complaining about food shortages. Samuel Turay, 21, said on Sunday that people in poorer neighbourhoods of the capital, Freetown, were upset that handouts of rice and pepper were being distributed only to some houses. A spokesman for the World Food Program, Alexis Masciarelli, said the agency had been providing food since the lockdown started Friday. But he said staff of the agency were not going door to door and were instead relying on health care workers and volunteers to identify needy households. Officials say Sierra Leoneans have largely complied with the lockdown designed to stem the biggest Ebola outbreak in history. The lockdown was set to end Sunday. The Ebola crisis in West Africa is a wide-ranging emergency that threatens to extend beyond the current regions of the outbreak, says the WHO. “This is a social crisis; a humanitarian crisis, an economic crisis and a threat to national security well beyond the outbreak zones,” Director General of WHO, Margaret Chan, told an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council on Thursday. In some areas, such as Liberia’s breadbasket region, hunger has become an even greater concern than the virus, Chan said. The UN Security Council is meeting to decide if the Ebola outbreak is a global threat. Such a declaration could help push a co-ordinated strategy to handle the spread of the disease. Elsewhere, people in Sierra Leone were being told to stay inside for three days as part of a lockdown to control the Ebola outbreak, but a medical aid agency has warned the move could exacerbate the spread of the disease. The WHO said that more than 700 more Ebola cases emerged in West Africa in one week, which suggests the outbreak is accelerating. The Ebola virus has made more than 5,300 sick, mainly in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, and killed more than 2,600. Sierra Leone’s government announced residents must stay home for three days. During the three-day measure, volunteers moved house to house to look for cases of Ebola with the aim of halting new infections and deliver information on the virus along with bars of soap. “They will be going from house to house basically to be able to provide very clear message about Ebola and to be able to tell people what they should do within their family circle if they find that a particular member within the family is suffering from Ebola,” said Steven Gaogia, co-ordinator of the emergency operation centre in Freetown. Doctors Without Borders has warned that expertise is needed to conduct door-to-door screening and there’s a lack of Ebola treatment centres to manage potential patients so identified. “It has been our experience that lockdowns and quarantines do not help control Ebola as they end up driving people underground and jeopardising the trust between people and health providers,” the medical aid group said in a statement when the lockdown was proposed. “This leads to the concealment of potential cases and ends up spreading the disease further.” Barry Andrews, chief executive of Irish aid agency Goal, also criticized the move. “I’m not sure a public information campaign requires the draconian measure of three days locking six million people into their homes,” he said. “It puts terrible pressure on vulnerable people. People who live hand to mouth will find it difficult.” Last month in the West Point area of Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, a riot erupted after the army arrived to enforce quarantine. Monrovia alone needs about 1,000 more beds, WHO said in noting that Liberia remains the worst affected country. “Increases in demand for Ebola Treatment Centre (ETC) beds and referral unit places are continuing to outstrip capacity in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone,” the UN health agency said in its update on Thursday. Infected health-care workers WHO called infections among health-care workers a “particularly alarming feature of this outbreak.” So far, 318 health workers have developed Ebola virus disease and almost half have died. The workers focus on isolating and treating the sick and tracking the contacts of those who are infected to prevent further spread. Elsewhere, Doctors Without Borders said it took two days to repatriate a female health-care worker to France from Liberia in a specially adapted U.S. aircraft. She’s the aid group’s first international staff member to be infected. “For a doctor, it’s not acceptable to have people dying in front of you, to be unable to admit patients into quarantine centres because of a lack of international involvement, to ask bystanders to go back to their houses and risk them infecting those close to them, their families, their community,” the group’s director for Belgium, Dr. Bertrand Degruez, told reporters in French. “It’s no longer acceptable to not have an airplane to reduce the time taken for medical evacuations.” The group’s operations director, Brice de la Vigne, said Doctors Without Borders has asked governments for a Medevac plane located in West Africa for such emergencies. The US President Barack Obama had last week labelled Ebola a national security priority that demands fast action.
Posted on: Mon, 22 Sep 2014 02:43:27 +0000
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